Past is Prologue
by Selkit
Summary: As I lay awake at night, listening to the sounds of Marie kicking and screaming her way through other people’s nightmares, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this door to her past hadn’t completely closed yet. Oneshot, post X3.


**Disclaimer:**_ X-Men_ and its characters don't belong to me, and I'm not making any profit from this fanfic.

- - -

It's ironic how a person's life can be changed by something as mundane as a telephone call or a knock on the door.

Not long ago, I was in the middle of a typical day here in Meridian, Mississippi. It was a Saturday, and I had the day off from my secretary job, so I was getting ready to finish up a few assorted household chores. As soon as the kitchen floor was swept and the upstairs carpet vacuumed, I promised myself, I would be free to grab a cold drink and get back to the murder mystery novel I was reading. I was just getting to the good part—the victim's body was about to be discovered—and I fully intended to spend several uninterrupted hours reading and attempting to figure out whodunit.

I completed the chores quickly, humming to myself all the while, then grabbed my book and settled myself comfortably in the living room.

I hadn't read more than a few pages when the phone suddenly rang.

The normally shrill sound seemed even more deafening than usual—partly because the house was quiet and partly because I was engrossed in my book. Startled, I nearly dropped my glass of ice-cold lemonade, narrowly managing to avoid spilling it all over myself.

I let out an annoyed huff and rolled my eyes skyward as the ever-impatient phone sounded again. Still holding the book, I hauled myself off the couch and made my way to the kitchen, grumbling all the while about people who just couldn't wait to call until _after_ I was finished reading.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," I muttered as the phone shrieked a third time. Finally making it to the kitchen, I plucked the phone from its cradle and spoke into it perhaps a bit more tersely than I normally would. "D'Ancanto residence."

There was a pause, and I wondered if the caller had hung up. I was about to do likewise when the person on the other end of the line spoke. She had a voice I hadn't heard in nearly three years.

"Mom?" she said.

The mystery novel, suddenly completely forgotten, tumbled from my fingers and landed on the floor with a dull thud. I gripped the phone tightly with fingers that had begun to tremble, wondering if my ears were playing a cruel joke on me.

"Marie?"

She let out a pent-up breath, and even though the reception wasn't particularly good, I thought I could hear a catch in her voice as she spoke. "Yeah, it's me. It's Marie."

- - -

It had been several weeks after Marie's mutant powers activated without warning, putting her boyfriend David into a coma, that her father and I awoke to find her gone. Her bed was neatly made, her room put in order, her money and her most special possessions missing from her shelves. Resting on her pillow was a note written on the colorful stationary we'd bought her for her birthday. It simply said that she had gone, and asked us not to look for her.

Naturally, despite the request in her note, we did everything in our power to find her and bring her home, but it was no use. By that time, she had gone too far and covered her tracks too well.

Nearly a year passed before we heard any news of her. It was one of the most difficult years of my life. As if the strain of not knowing my young daughter's whereabouts wasn't bad enough, the malicious whispered rumors circling the community made it even harder to cope. In a typical suburban neighborhood like ours, young "mutant freaks" who vanished in the middle of the night made for choice gossip fodder.

Finally, ten months after she disappeared, we received a letter. It was painfully short, saying only that she was alive and safe, and apologizing for not being able to write earlier. There was no return address, no hint as to her location. After that, we heard nothing more from her until the phone call on that hot Saturday afternoon.

- - -

A few days after she called, Marie showed up on the front doorstep, duffel bag in hand. I can't describe what it felt like, opening the door to see her standing there, alive and tangible and not a figment of one of the many scenarios my imagination had created over the past three years.

Most of that afternoon is now just a blur in my mind, even though it wasn't that long ago. But the way Marie looked the first moment I saw her is chiseled into my memory like an ancient inscription in granite.

When she'd left, she'd been so young—she had celebrated her sweet sixteenth birthday only a few weeks before her mutation appeared. Physically, the young woman standing on the front porch didn't look all that different from the girl who had run away. She was more filled out, no longer gangly. Something subtle had changed in the way she carried herself; even as she stood motionless in front of me, I could tell. Her head was higher, her shoulders straighter. And framing her face were two distinctive-looking locks of milk-white hair that hadn't been there before.

But it was her eyes that held the real change. They were older, much older than they should have been. It was like she'd aged decades instead of a handful of years. They held an odd sort of resignation, weariness, the kind you would expect to see in the expression of a refugee from a war-torn country, not a nineteen-year-old girl born and raised in an average, middle-class American family.

I remember, for that first moment, all I could do was stare at her in a wordless state of surprise, immediately wondering what exactly my little girl had gone through in those few years that had made her grow up so much more than she should have.

To my dismay, she wasn't very forthcoming on that score. As we began the process of getting reacquainted, I gently brought up the subject a few times: where had she been all these years, and what had she been doing?

I quickly became familiar with the look that would cross her face whenever the topic came up. I might as well have been talking to freshly poured concrete that was hardening by the second. However, she did, after some persuasion (she might have called it nagging), reveal a few details. She had been living in New York State, at a special school for mutants, where she finished the high school education that had abruptly been put on hold when she left home. She told me—to my great relief, I'll admit—that she had decided to take the mutant cure I'd heard so much about on the news recently. But apparently, the decision had not gone over well with certain individuals at the school. She felt she had no choice but to run again, leaving the place that had been her refuge for all that time.

When I tried to delicately dig for more details, she clammed up completely, her face closing like a door being slammed shut. I didn't ask again. I would have liked nothing more than to hear about every aspect of her life that I had missed, but forcing her to talk would have done far more harm than good. Patience had never been my strong point, but I reluctantly convinced myself to wait, to go with Marie's timing. She would talk about her past once she was ready…I hoped.

Days turned to weeks, and almost before I knew it, Marie had been home for nearly a month. She made plans to start taking classes at the local community college the following term, and she began searching for a job and an apartment nearby.

I wish I could say that everything went back to the way it had been when Marie was an innocent sixteen-year-old with nothing to worry about but her post-high school plans. At first glance, everything appeared normal. Marie seemed to be settling back into Mississippi life. She smiled at old acquaintances, laughed cheerily and politely avoided their questions just as she had mine. But in the privacy of the house, someone watching closely would notice a faraway, melancholy expression on her face. It didn't take a brilliant sleuth like those in my beloved mystery novels to deduce that her thoughts were hundreds of miles away from Meridian.

It was the worst at night. She would usually turn in fairly early, an hour or two before her father and me. But not long after we went to bed, we would begin to hear noises from her bedroom.

The first night it happened, I thought she was being attacked. I was awakened from a light doze by what sounded like sounded like thumps and muffled screams. I raced to her room, brandishing the first thing within grabbing reach—a heavy flashlight. But instead of finding her grappling with a vicious intruder, I saw that she was in the throes of a nightmare.

They say you're not supposed to wake people up when they're having nightmares, but I didn't even stop to think. After what seemed like an eternity of dodging her wildly thrashing limbs, I was able to shake her out of it. She startled awake so quickly I was afraid for a moment that she would hurt herself. But to my relief, she recognized me and began to calm down, gulping deep breaths and pushing tangled hair back from her sweat-streaked face.

I quickly got a cool cup of water from the bathroom faucet and handed it to her, rubbing her back soothingly as she drank.

"Would it help to talk about it?" I asked after a few moments, keeping my voice quiet and reassuring.

She didn't answer right away, just stared into the cup of water and watched a few stray droplets trickle down the side. It was difficult to make out her expression with only the pale light from the window to see by, so I reached over and turned her bedside lamp on the lowest setting.

The look on her face seemed strangely wistful. I frowned a little, almost wishing I had telepathic mutant powers so I could see what was going on in her head. Finally she blew out a deep sigh and gave me a wan smile. "Thanks, Mom, but…I can't really talk about it. I'll be okay."

The familiar sense of frustration crept over me again, and my frown deepened. "Are you sure, honey? That looked like a really bad dream you were having. Was it about something that happened…while you were gone?"

She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing them with her hands, and I could see the goosebumps on her skin. She stayed silent for a moment, rocking back and forth almost imperceptibly, a troubled look on her face as she debated with herself. I waited.

Finally she came to a conclusion and shook her head. "I'm sorry, Mom. I would like to talk about it, but I can't go into detail. It's kind of hard to explain."

I must have looked completely stupefied, because after a moment, she bit her lip and continued. "Okay, look…over the past few years, I…touched people. Or they touched me. I absorbed their thoughts, their memories…even their dreams. I know about all the things that happened to them…" She trailed off and swallowed. "All the things they did. I thought the memories might fade when I took the cure, but they didn't. At least, they haven't yet." She paused and sighed again. "There's some pretty nasty stuff floating around in my head."

I don't remember exactly how I responded to that, or even if I gave a verbal response at all. Mostly, all I can recall is the horrified thought that instantly leaped to my mind: exactly what kind of people _had_ Marie come in contact with these past few years?

My husband, Marie's father, is fond of telling me I have an over-active imagination, and he may have a point. I immediately began to visualize my young, innocent daughter being stalked and ruthlessly preyed upon by huge, hulking thugs with multiple tattoos and evil leers—the kind of men you see on crime shows or in mug shots in the newspaper. Seeing where my thoughts were going, Marie quickly tried to convince me that it "wasn't like that" and that she had been coping with this issue for a while now and was used to it.

But despite her attempts to downplay it, she still refused to elaborate on the details of these foreign memories she was carrying around. And the nightmares continued.

Now, I certainly don't consider myself to be prophetic, or anything of the sort. Most likely it's just my aforementioned over-active imagination coming into play. But on rare occasions, I get a strange sense of foreboding. And as I lay awake at night, listening to the sounds of Marie kicking and screaming her way through other people's nightmares a few rooms over, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe this door to her past hadn't completely closed yet. Maybe the people she had touched—or who had touched her—weren't alley-lurking criminals, but if their memories were anything to go by, I was willing to bet they were still dangerous.

And if, for some reason, they should decide to come after Marie, she no longer had her mutation as a defense.

I dug my husband's old baseball bat out of the closet and placed it next to the bed at night, within easy grabbing distance. I had always been a light sleeper, but now I dozed even more fitfully—waking up at even the slightest disturbance, holding my breath and straining my ears for the sound of an intruder.

But several more weeks went by, nothing out of the ordinary occurred, and Marie's nightmares became slightly less frequent. I began to relax a little. Grudgingly, I admitted to myself that maybe my so-called foreboding was simply a mild case of paranoia—or possibly just the product of reading too many murder mysteries. I decided to keep the baseball bat by my bed at night, just to be safe, but during the day life continued to go on as normal.

Then, one afternoon, I heard a banging on the front door.

- - -

It was a Saturday and I was home from work, just like the day that Marie had called, less than two months before. I was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables for lunch and humming along with the radio. Marie was upstairs; I could hear her footsteps above my head as she moved around her room.

The sudden, rather harsh-sounding knock at the front door startled me a bit, just as the ringing phone had on that other Saturday. I frowned a little in confusion. I wasn't expecting any visitors…

The proverbial lightbulb went off over my head, and my expression cleared as I came up with an explanation. I had ordered a few dresses from a catalogue not long ago, and the person at the door was most likely the UPS man coming to deliver them. My confusion disappearing, I set down the vegetable-chopping knife and walked briskly down the hall. It fleetingly occurred to me that the UPS deliveryman usually rang the doorbell instead of knocking, but I brushed the inconsistency aside and went to open the door.

The thought that immediately crossed my mind once I saw the man standing on the porch was that he definitely did _not_ work for the United Parcel Service.

For a moment I just stood, openmouthed, looking at him. Then all at once, the fears that had been nagging at me since Marie's first nightmare leapt back with a vengeance.

The man looked, in a word, dangerous. He was tall, nearly towering over me, and built like a pro football player. Thick hair covered his head and much of his face; he clearly didn't pay that much attention to shaving. His hands were curled into fists, and his eyes glowered at me beneath dark, almost bushy eyebrows.

I continued to gape at him, and almost absently I noticed that his nostrils were flaring slightly, as though he were sniffing the air. For a split second I wondered what on earth he was smelling, but my frenzied mind quickly turned to the more pressing question: what was I going to do? Should I wait for him to say something? Slam the door in his face and call 911?

He made the decision for me. I was so caught up in slightly panicked thoughts that I nearly didn't register his deep, almost brusque voice saying, "I need to talk to Marie."

I froze. Once again, my options ran through my head like a herd of startled horses. I considered telling him that no one named Marie lived at this address, but dismissed the idea just as quickly. There was no knowing what resources he had—somehow he had tracked her here, and I doubted that my word would be enough to turn him away. Maybe I could tell him that she wasn't home at the moment…

That possibility disappeared just as suddenly as the first when I heard quick footsteps on the stairs behind me. Marie's voice rang out a second later, yelling, "Mom, I'm going to the library now—"

Her words cut off abruptly as she caught sight of the man on the front porch, and her descent down the stairs stopped so suddenly I was afraid she would lose her balance and fall the rest of the way.

"Marie—" I began, then stopped, my mouth opening and closing but no sound coming out. I had intended to ask her "do you know this man?" but there was no need. One look at her face made the answer plainly obvious.

I edged away from the door a little, watching as a hundred different emotions crossed Marie's face in the span of a few seconds, astonishment chief among them. I saw no hint of fear in her eyes, but oddly, that didn't reassure me as much as I had hoped.

"Marie," I repeated, but once again, I couldn't get any words to come out aside from her name. Fortunately, this time I didn't have to. She blinked a few times as though snapping out of a trance, then shot an unreadable look at me.

"It's okay, Mom," she said. Her voice was a little uneven, but she had done an admirable job of quickly covering up her emotions. She looked calm—much calmer than I felt. "I'll just be a few minutes, okay?"

Without waiting for a response, she finished walking down the stairs and strode out of the house, brushing past the man, and closed the door firmly behind her.

For a moment, all I could do was stand and stare dumbly at the door, until finally I collected my wits and raced to the kitchen, anxiously peering out the window into the backyard. It didn't take long to spot them, and I allowed myself a sigh of relief that they had stayed within my line of sight. This was clearly a conversation that Marie wanted to conduct out of hearing range, but it would have taken a herd of rampaging elephants to keep me from watching them. Marie may have known this rough-looking man, but I didn't trust him as far as I could throw him.

I clasped my hands together tightly, resisting the urge to wring them, and watched my daughter and the stranger. I didn't have to hear what they were saying to know that they were arguing. Marie's eyes were narrowed, her lips slightly curled, arms crossed over her chest. I recognized it as her "stubborn" look—I had seen it more than a few times as she was growing up.

The conversation was going rapidly; first one talking, the other listening, then interrupting. For a few minutes, I attempted to lip-read to see if I could get the gist of what they were saying, but I quickly gave up and settled for pacing in front of the window, fretting silently.

Who _was_ he, and what did he want from her? My original fears appeared to be unfounded—if he had planned to hurt Marie in some way, he surely would have done it by now. Was he from the school in New York? He certainly didn't look like the type of person I would expect to find at a school, but maybe it was different among mutants. Or maybe he wasn't even a mutant at all. My head spun with the volume of unanswered questions.

Out the window, it appeared that the tone of the conversation had changed. Marie's stubborn look had gradually faded, and was now replaced by a more mellow, contemplative expression as she listened to what the man was saying. As I watched, he took a step closer to her and laid his hand on her shoulder, his thumb massaging it slowly.

A second later he pulled her into his arms, murmuring something into her ear. She didn't resist, instead returning the embrace, her head turned away from the window so I was unable to see her expression.

For a moment, I didn't know what to do. Suddenly I felt almost guilty for watching them, and wondered if I should turn away and give them their privacy. But on the other hand, she was my daughter. Shouldn't I have more claim to her than this gruff stranger? After a few more seconds of deliberation, I finally forced myself to step away from the window, walk calmly over to the kitchen table and sit down to wait.

A few minutes later I heard the sound of the front door opening and light footsteps coming down the hallway. I looked up from where I had been studying my folded hands to see Marie appear at the kitchen entrance.

She bit her lip a little, giving me a smile that seemed both hesitant and a little sad, and I knew.

"You're leaving again, aren't you?" I asked quietly.

She looked down at her toes, then back at me, and nodded silently.

I took in a deep breath and released it slowly. My mind raced with a thousand things I wanted to say, but finally all that came out was, "Who is he?"

She hesitated for a long moment, and another series of emotions flickered across her face, just as they had when she first saw him standing at the door. She looked deep in thought, her eyes losing focus slightly as they slid from my face to a patch of sunlight on the tile floor. Finally she smiled a little and said simply, "He's…a friend."

All I could do was nod. I had a feeling that, were she to completely describe their relationship, it probably would have taken hours.

The next thing I knew, she had crossed the room in two steps and enveloped me in a tight hug. "I'm sorry to be leaving again so soon, Mom," she said, her voice muffled against my neck. "But I promise I'll do better at staying in touch this time."

I nodded again and hugged her back, willing myself not to cry. She was nineteen years old, old enough to make her own decisions, I reminded myself. She was no longer the frightened little girl who had fled the house in the middle of the night.

She pulled back a little and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then turned and ran up the stairs to her room. A few minutes later she returned, carrying the same duffel bag that she had taken when she ran away.

She paused at the doorway, slinging the bag over her shoulder and giving me a smile. I had to admit, in that one expression, she looked happier than she had at anytime during the previous two months. I managed a small but genuine smile in return. In a way, the knowledge that maybe now she could finally be content made up for losing her a second time.

"I'll talk to you soon. Love you, Mom," she said, and then she disappeared out the front door. I peered out the window to where the man was standing, his arms crossed over his chest, leaning against a pickup truck with a New York license plate. As Marie approached him, his gruff expression softened a little into a half-smile—the first time I'd seen him smile since he showed up on the porch.

Marie tossed her duffel bag into the truck, climbed into the passenger seat and buckled up, then turned to wave at me as the man turned the key in the ignition. I waved back as the truck pulled onto the street and turned a corner, disappearing from sight.

I stood at the window, watching, long after they had gone. Finally I turned around, and as my eyes fell on the telephone, I thought back to when Marie had first called. I couldn't deny that I was still reeling from how quickly she had come back into my life, then left again. But at the same time, somehow I knew that she would make good on her promise to keep in touch.

I didn't know when the phone would ring again. But I hoped it would be soon.


End file.
